Bear in mind that the GTVA had the lift capacity to evacuate Capella not once, but twice.
I have to check that when I get home but as I remember it the evacuation of Capella never stopped after the Sath 1 was destroyed.EDIT: Okay I checked now before going out. Damn you HLP.
CB of "Return to Babel" (SM3-03.fs2), stage 2:
"... Until we completely secure the nebula, our evacuation of Capella's civilian population will proceed as planned."
So the evacuation of Capella never ended after the destruction of the Sath 1. Which doesn't invalidate your argument on the numbers of ships involved, point taken there. However we don't exactly know what happened with the Capellans after leaving Capella, maybe they didn't stay on the ships, then the number of evacuation ships could have been smaller, or they did, which implies a large fleet doing the job.
For the Vasudan Prime evacuation, we have no figures. Though it is implied that the evacuees stayed on their ships, we have no cannonical evidence that these ship all were PVFr Satis ("Exodus" suggests that but in that mission you are only operating one of three routes out of Vasuda Prime). Also Vasuda Prime was threatened by invasion at the beginning of FS1, so the planet may have been evacuated to certain degree at some point already.
Also I never said there aren't many intersystem ships, I just said there aren't many companies that run them due to the cost and specific nature of the ships required for commercial use. The GTT Argo might just fit the description as long lifetime and being upgradeable, as I never implied that the ship has to be huge, only its powerplant has to generate the required output for the jumps and that said output (in my fanfic of the FS-verse) was huge unless you used really expensive drives.
@Mebber & Trashman:
I copied most of ideas regarding terraforming from Roger McBride Allen's novels "The Depths of Time", "The Ocean of Years" and "The Shores of Tomorrow". I've simplified the ideas in most post a lot, if you want the details on Contraction and terraforming close to what I imagine, look there.
Terraforming/Colonizing a planet is a delicate process and implanted ecosystems by their very nature discourage travel from one planet to another.
That could be a problem, but it's not said that every colonized planet features a complex implanted ecosystem or is even viable for terraforming. If planets which can support garden-world like terraforming is something rare, i think it's save to assume that the colonies will make more use of systems like arcologies, dome habitats and similiar smaller and more easily controlled ecosystems by transforming local resources, which would make it possible to use more 'standarized' ecosystem assets, which is much more cost-effective than to plan an entire complex ecosystem for every new world, and would reduce the impact of possible contamination from another planets colony ecosystem.
The problem in standardizing biological ressources is that biological ressources are envoirment-specific to huge degree. You can just send a successful algea-species from Earth to Mars and hope it will floursih. A species from Earth is largely depened on the specific conditions found on Earth begining with the gravity level (see bone and muscle degereration in members of zero-g missions) and ending with having specific wave-lenghts of light for chemical synthesis, e.g. a planet that can be colonized may not have a sun sporting the right wavelenghts for photosynthesis in green plantlife.
Following that every biological ressource used in terrafroming has be to specific for its target envoriment.
'Controlled' is another key problem here.
Ecosystems are not static but exist in states (note: plural) of equilibrium which account for changing circumstances inside and outside the biological component of the ecosystem. Naturally, changes to the whole are not appearent within a generation of a single species and cannot be measured without taking in accound a timespan of centuries. Changes to a single component, biological or otherwise, are frequent and may be cyclic (like the relation between prey and predator populations) or not. Disruption to the system might pass or it might not. Determining which is the case in any scenario is difficult as the observational span is huge and the timeframe, in which something can be dome about it safely, is small.
Even if you confine an ecosystem to small sealed dome you still have the problem that a) outside contaminats could get in (perhaps on people) or b) that the system itselfs evolves (esspecially on the microlevel) and might upset the carefully tailored balance. In a sealed envoirment the species migration is practically eliminated as well, so a species cannot evade competition by simply 'going' somewhere else where conditions for its growth are met. Without evasion a species would be 'compelled' to either die out or evolve to meet the competition, both are generation long processes which trigger changes across the ecosystem.
If a ressource cannot be naturally found at a colony site, the colony's society, in the long run, finds a way to substitue the ressource with something readily avalible or easily optainable.
Economic policy is to restrict production to products that can be manufactured with local supplies in order to limit foreign control over policies in a system.
I agree, but it's more than likely that specific worlds have excesses in specific resources while are short on others, so i think they will focus on producing, refining and processing goods they have and export them, and import goods they lack of. And it's not only about establishing self-sufficiency but also about the growth of (not necessary for survival) wealth which would drive people to trade. And if there is a demand for transporting goods, there will be someone to satisfy this demand.
I played with that idea too. Problem is our lack of knowledge about the distribution of light, heavy and rare element in a planet's crust safe Earth (and maybe Moon and now Mars, although I'm pretty sure there examinations are limited to surface rock). So I assumed the distribution of light, heavy and rare elements in most star systems that have been colonized in the FS-verse to be rather similar and so most colonies would have access to the same ressources in their own system.
Since resource trade was out of picture the trade with produced goods would imply that at site A produced good 1 had a quality other than good 1 produced at site B. Current day most differences in the same good produced at different site are result of either access to the ressources, access to production technology (which in this definition may also include know-how and skill of the workforce) or simply buisness policy (high quality maybe expensive and time-consuming to produce, low quality isn't). As per above, access to ressources isn't a defining factor, and as per the statement of subsitution in my other post, technological access can be factored out as well if you assume a population that has easily access to higher education (a given I assume).
So as it be a matter of buisness policy, you have to factor in the economic system which you apply as a foundation. I prefer to use a model of politically guided market economics (retaining the flexibility of market-based economics but makeing the 'demands/necessities of the market' not a driving force in politics). A system like that would favour high quaility goods as those can easily given a high-price tag due to their long lifetime, which then can be used to balance out the high costs of production due to the cost of labour, meeting goverment regulations and ressources.
That's a lot of assumptions but its also fiction as well.
EDIT: Note: There is one exception in my SoI/WotW-background to the rule of self-sustaining colonial economics, that's GTA-era Earth which had a demand exceeding its in-system supply as Sol was home to the vast majority of the GTA's economic assets
